Painkillers in the opium family (most notably morphine) may actually make pain last longer, a new study reports. Morphine treatment after a nerve injury doubled the duration of pain in rats and this is highly worrying. It gets even more disturbing when you consider the addictive potential of many commercial opioids such as OxyContin and Vicodin. If this is true, then people are becoming

Curiosity is probably the single most powerful force behind our species’ scientific discoveries. It can drive us to explore and discover even if the outcome might be painful or harmful. But this need to discover and learn can also become a curse; a new study found that people are willing to face unpleasant outcomes with no apparent benefits just to sate their curiosity.

Humans have tattooed themselves since times immemorial to celebrate gods, show social standing, for medicinal purposes or just to look good. And since the dawn of this controversial form of art, people have endured excruciating pain to adorn their body with ink; but why does tattooing hurt so much?

Researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed implantable devices that can activate — and in theory, block too — pain signals traveling from the body through the spinal cord before they reach the brain.

Chinese researchers discovered a chemical compound that works just as well as morphine — without any of the negative side effects. The substance is derived from the venom of a centipede native to China. The discovery has huge medical applications, and could potentially reduce the country’s military reliance on morphine for battlefield use.

A breakthrough research found that male and female mice use different cells to signal pain. This could explain why both more women suffer from chronic pain than men, and pain relief medication seems to respond differently in women.

Seems like your mom was right all along: scratching does, in fact, makes the itching worse. This was the conclusion reached by a group of researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis after the scientists studied the molecular and neural pathways that cause and relieve itching. The findings suggest that scratching releases serotonin – a key neurotransmitter involved in

I have never in my life eaten a crab or a lobster, because ever since I was a kid, boiling an animal alive seemed extremely cruel; it just didn’t make sense that an animal doesn’t feel pain – and even today, it doesn’t, to me. Pain is your body’s way of telling you something is damaged and needs fixing. It